


is it bright where you are

by paperiuni



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Don't @ Me, Emotional Intimacy, Fluff and Angst, Immortality Issues (Shadowhunter Chronicles), M/M, Pillow Talk, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:15:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25243738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: Magnus sighs into Alec's cheek. "What would I ever do without you?"Alec and Magnus spend a quiet moment on a delicate subject: their time is not and will not be the same.
Relationships: Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood
Comments: 52
Kudos: 201
Collections: Hunter's Moon Fic Recs





	is it bright where you are

**Author's Note:**

> I aten't dead, just in the middle of a serial writing crisis (and relentless real life). <333 Here's a little something, anyway.
> 
> This exists in a vague post-show timeline where there's a time skip before the wedding. Because as much as I love the wedding they could have used a longer engagement.

Magnus collapses into the pillows with sticky, boneless satisfaction, limbs going every which way. Alec presses a damp kiss on his brow. "Be right back."

He slips through Magnus's grasping fingers, which should come as no surprise when Magnus can barely tell his left hand from his right, and leaves Magnus to contemplate the exhausting joys of strapping young Shadowhunters all too eager to please.

The afternoon is gone. Most of the _evening_ is gone. The hours melted away somewhere beyond the bed, and Magnus is feeling very _laissez-faire_ about it all. The happy conjunction of their days off meant they met for a late lunch, came back to the loft, and the rest is Alec's touch and Alec's skin and delightful new bruises in interesting places. He could banish the aches with magic. The thought of a healing spell feels as impossible as reversing the course of the Hudson.

He'll get there. What was life like before Alec blew into it and made Magnus think—think again—that making love for half a day on end was a good idea? Repeatedly, too.

It was quieter. He could lose weeks like he's lost this afternoon—or no, if anything, he lost them in the opposite way. They went by unnoticed because they were each like the one before, patterned with work and friends and parties and comfortable tedium. A predictable current where he was content to float. 

Now, everything is bright and stark and laden with meaning. He'd forgotten the way love quickens not only the heart but the world, washes off the dust like a rainstorm after a heat wave.

"Here." The mattress slopes under Alec's weight. He sets a warm, wrung washcloth to Magnus's stomach, and Magnus hums a laugh.

"I could have walked to the bathroom. In another five minutes."

"Sure," Alec says, with arid affection, "but you could also let me do this for you." He continues, with methodical strokes, until Magnus is mostly clean of the evidence of their tumble and all its sequels.

Magnus scoops him into a kiss. He's sex-tousled and mellow and radiant, and even the languid kiss sparks unwise ideas in the baser reaches of Magnus's mind.

He sighs into Alec's cheek. "What would I ever do without you?"

With a huff, Alec drops his gaze to a point somewhere off the bed. Magnus's brain stutters to the conclusion that he just said something wrong, even as Alec slumps next to him onto the tangled sheets.

"Alexander?"

The beautiful line of Alec's exposed throat moves as he swallows. He grinds the heel of his palm into his temple. "You'll find out one day, right?"

Magnus makes a face. "I wasn't being literal, you know that."

If he sounds dismissive, it's only because the question staggers him. They've had the Argument, the one that has a capital letter in Magnus's mind—the one where a mortal lover first grasps the fact that Magnus's time is not the same as theirs.

They never quite resolved that one. It got buried in the rubble of yet another crisis that superseded their relationship drama. Now they're bound by rings and promises and the prospect of a _life_ together, so maybe Magnus thought he could get away with sentimental hyperbole in the afterglow.

"It's still a real question." Alec's eyes are dark, their corners taut. "You can't stop time from happening."

"You've been thinking about this." It's an educated guess, but Alec's sharp sigh proves him right.

Magnus's joyful languor is marred, but a part of him knows he's put off this conversation, and Alec has been taking his cues from him. Once a problem raises its ugly head, Alec's strategy is to barrel straight at it. However, he has a lifetime of practice at sternly denying that a given problem even exists.

Until now. Alec chose his moment, or at least seized an opportunity.

"What if I have?" A hint of defiance in Alec's voice. "You're it for me. So the best thing that can happen, for me, is that you'll outlive me. Which you will, unless something happens." Things have settled into a routine in the last few months, but in their lives, that isn't the same as peaceful by any measure. "Sometimes I think about you after me. That's the truth."

It should be a testimony to how far they've come in those months that Alec speaks without either the heat of anger or abject misery. Magnus still notes the tiny tremor in his hand.

"We're going here, then." Magnus rolls over onto his stomach. "What's eating at you? In particular."

He takes the risk of reaching for Alec's hand. Alec allows him, curling his fingers loosely between Magnus's own. Neither of them are wearing their rings; they sit to the side in the safety of the nightstand.

As far as Magnus's remarkable memory serves, he's never seen this conversation through. Sometimes he hid, playing at being merely human for a few fleeting years or decades. Sometimes this was the breaking point, and he was left to sweep up the ashes of another love, another hope he never should've entertained.

"I don't want you to mourn me forever." It is candid, fittingly for someone who's always known he may die young. Magnus still jumps, squeezing down on Alec's hand. Alec tightens his own grip. "I mean it. You're not like me. You might not be like me even if you weren't immortal."

"I wouldn't know. I barely managed to dabble at mortality." Magnus's humor tints to the bitter. "But as long as you are here, you have my heart. I've promised you that. I intend to stand by it."

Alec's chest rises and falls. One breath, another, another. Magnus stops himself from counting them. Alec is leading them, and so it falls to him to follow.

"I know." The silence before might undermine the words, but Alec's tone braces them. "It's just that we've never talked about this. Not without shouting. Just the fact that the most likely way this ends is with me leaving you behind."

Magnus wants to shut him up. Muffle him with a kiss, bury them both into the bed and forget this subject before it rends him into ribbons. He can't.

"We've done this a little backwards, no?" He arches a brow. "I'm no expert, but this feels like something we might have talked about _before_ getting engaged."

"At least it's before the wedding?"

There was a moment, on that first morning after Edom, in which Magnus almost woke Alec up and insisted they marry on the spot. Their early relationship was girded in urgency, a burst of emotion neither of them had a proper handle on. A wartime romance, culminating in a wedding on the first day the guns were silent.

It had a nice ring to it. But something made him let the impulse go.

 _You have time again now_ , he told himself. _All the time in the world._

In this soft aftermath, after a day spent on unhurried desire, there finally seems to be enough time.

"I know that isn't really your style," Magnus says. "A long engagement."

"You're basing this on what evidence? When I was so busy patching up my family's honor that I almost made myself—and Lydia—miserable for, how'd you put it, the rest of our lives?" The bite in Alec's voice is welcome.

"I was thinking more about your cultural propensity for living fast. Though that's neither here nor there." Magnus fits his right side to Alec's left, his head on Alec's bicep, half an embrace. "I've been in love before you. I... may fall in love again after you. That is also the truth. The possibility exists."

"You didn't want to talk about it before."

"Are we doing this, or dredging up more of our respective mistakes?"

After a beat of tension, Alec bends his arm, strokes his fingertips through Magnus's matted hair.

Magnus says, whisper-thin, "Does it still bother you? That I keep others in my memory?"

"It didn't _bother_ me." Alec makes a soft _tch_ sound. "Look. I don't want to _compete_ with them. You chose me. I know that. Sometimes I don't know how to deal with all your time. The fact that I could just... be like a summer fling for you. Something you'll put in a box and look at fondly from time to time."

_Maybe someday, one of my arrowheads is going to end up in that box. And you'll just move on._

"So 'bother' wasn't strong enough a word." Magnus folds his hands on his stomach before they turn restive. "You know something about grief? The only way it gets easier is to dull yourself to the source of it. To tear out the shoot before it even buds, as it were."

"You can get to the point," Alec says, but his voice, too, is papery.

With an inelegant tug of breath, Magnus says, "You don't have grief without love. The day you go will rip out my heart. There's no amount of preparation or philosophy or jaded prior experience that will make that _easier,_ Alexander."

He doesn't quite register moving, but he finds himself face to face with Alec, on his elbows to look down at Alec's widened eyes.

"I didn't—"

"You meant it."

Magnus watches Alec's expression twist through the shock and guilt and resolve into tight-jawed acceptance.

"I want you to be happy," Alec says, hoarse, and Magnus's purpose crumbles into hopeless empathy. "I also want you to be happy with _me_. I don't want you to shut away pieces of yourself for my sake, but..."

"I am happy with you. That's what started this conversation." Slowly, as if of their own accord, Magnus's fingers spread over Alec's heart. It's a quiet, steady drum under his palm. "I'm trying to tell you. You don't always get things right with me, and neither do I with you, but you're always, always worth the effort."

It's more a stab in the dark than a solidly aimed shot, but it lands. Alec's shoulders hitch with a rusty-sounding chuckle, and he pulls Magnus close, his face in the hollow of Magnus's throat, and holds on.

"It just hurts sometimes," he mutters, "that I love you so much."

"Would you take it back?" The question constricts Magnus's throat to ask. "Us?"

"Not in a lifetime." Alec pauses. "Mine or yours."

"Then there's your answer," Magnus says, "or something as close to one as we're ever likely to get. This is _our_ time, now, here. It will never come again. If... if it falls to me to remember it someday, then I will, for as long as I live. That you were here, and we loved each other, and that made everything else worthwhile."

Alec clasps Magnus's hand where it's laid on his chest. "We're still present tense."

"I know." Magnus kisses his smile-softened mouth. "You remind me every day."

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The Smashing Pumpkins, who have done too much to convince me that bittersweet is the highest form of romance.


End file.
